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Suzy Teele is the chief strategy officer for the ARM Institute. The institute aims to strengthen U.S. manufacturing through innovations in advanced manufacturing technology, particularly robotics and AI, and prepare the workforce to work alongside these technologies.

Michelle: Your work is very important these days. Are there certain projects the institute's working on lately that are especially timely or interesting?

Suzy: Our mission is to really try to grow U.S. manufacturing through the adoption of automation technologies. And our specific focus is robotics in AI. So, we've spent--actually, we'll be celebrating our ten-year anniversary next year, so we've spent quite a bit of time working with manufacturers across the USA to really try to understand what their challenges are and what's preventing them from adopting automation technology.

And I would say overall, that's the problem we're trying to solve. The technology exists. It's existed for decades. Certainly, it gets better and easier to use every year, but we have a very small adoption rate in the United States for robotics and AI. Robotics particularly. And AI is broader because it's across all areas.

So, we're focused on physical AI. We tend to come in 10th or 12th in the world in terms of using automation. And so, our big mission is to understand why that's happening. And we do that in many different ways. One way is that we receive funding from the U.S. government, primarily the Department of Defense, to work on projects to make it easier to adopt robotics, making them easier to use, making them more flexible, making them better equipped to solve those problems, to do the work that humans don't want to do, that is dull, dirty, and dangerous.

We spent quite a bit of time working on that and then working with organizations who might be able to transition that technology into use.

So, that's one area. Critically important is workforce. You can't use a new automation technology if no one knows how to use it in your organization. And there's a real lack of expertise in the United States with using advanced technologies like robotics.

We do a lot of work on workforce and the workforce side, not doing education because there's a lot of educational programs out there, but pointing people to where they can get the education and develop their skills in order to be a robotics technician or a robotics analyst or some of the various jobs that are out there in the industry.